LOS ANGELES, June 6, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- ImaginAb, Inc. has been invited to join KeyMarker, a leading consortium of Belgian academic scientists and biotech companies for the discovery of new diagnostic and therapeutic targets for diabetes. This consortium is established under the framework of Biowin, the Health Competitiveness Cluster of the Walloon Region from Belgium. It is coordinated by IBA Molecular with Eurogentec and TraSis as industrial partners. Based on new biomarkers discovered at Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), its mission is to develop new targets to monitor and modulate beta cell depletion in adult-onset diabetes*. Several lead candidates will be developed in the second phase of funding of the KeyMarker consortium, to which ImaginAb will be a partner.

"Imaging beta cell depletion is a major unmet need, both in the clinic and in the development of new therapeutic modalities," said Dr. Christian Behrenbruch, Founder and CEO of ImaginAb. "ImaginAb's role in the consortium will be to engineer several promising antibodies against novel cell surface targets into highly sensitive and selective imaging agents that have the potential to be used to image and monitor beta cell populations in critical patient subsets."

About ImaginAb

Founded in 2007 by UCLA Faculty (Drs. Robert Reiter, Anna Wu and Christian Behrenbruch), ImaginAb, Inc. is a biotechnology company specializing in the development of engineered antibody fragments for diagnostic imaging and novel therapeutic applications. The company has a significant pipeline of clinical products in development oriented towards unmet needs in cancer and immunology. ImaginAb is also developing a range of pre-clinical (animal imaging) reagents for use with microPET, microSPECT and optical imaging systems, and partners on a selective basis with biopharmaceutical companies with an interest in developing companion imaging agents for therapeutic antibody products. For more information about ImaginAb, visit www.imaginab.com.

About KeyMarker

Program description: KeyMarker is a consortium established under Biowin, the Health Competitiveness Cluster of the Walloon Region from Belgium. The consortium's goal is to identify molecules that can be used as radiotracers for PET or SPECT imaging and potential quantification of the pancreatic Beta-cell mass. Such molecules may lead to novel approaches for diabetic disease management, such as patient stratification, disease follow-up and new therapeutic strategies. For more information visit www.biowin.org.

*the technologies described in this press release have not attained regulatory approval for clinical use in Europe or the USA

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